EMPIRES OF THE WORD A Language History of the World NICHOLAS OSTLER To Jane SINE QVA NON CONTENTS Cover Title Page PREFACE PROLOGUE: A CLASH OF LANGUAGES PART I: THE NATURE OF LANGUAGE HISTORY 1 Themistocles’ Carpet The language view of human history The state of nature Literacy and the beginning of language history 2 What It Takes to Be a World Language; or, You Never Can Tell PART II: LANGUAGES BY LAND 3 The Desert Blooms: Language Innovation in the Middle East Three sisters who span the history of 4500 years The story in brief: Language leapfrog Sumerian—the first classical language: Life after death FIRST INTERLUDE: WHATEVER HAPPENED TO ELAMITE? Akkadian—world-beating technology: A model of literacy Phoenician—commerce without culture: Canaan, and points west Aramaic—the desert song: Interlingua of western Asia SECOND INTERLUDE: THE SHIELD OF FAITH Arabic—eloquence and equality: The triumph of ‘submission’ THIRD INTERLUDE: TURKIC AND PERSIAN, OUTRIDERS OF ISLAM A Middle Eastern inheritance: The glamour of the desert nomad 4 Triumphs of Fertility: Egyptian and Chinese Careers in parallel Language along the Nile A stately progress Immigrants from Libya and Kush Competition from Aramaic and Greek Changes in writing Final paradoxes Language from Huang-he to Yangtze Origins First Unity Retreat to the south Northern influences Beyond the southern sea Dealing with foreign devils Whys and wherefores Holding fast to a system of writing Foreign relations China’s disciples Coping with invasions: Egyptian undercut Coping with invasions: Chinese unsettled 5 Charming Like a Creeper: The Cultured Career of Sanskrit The story in brief The character of Sanskrit Intrinsic qualities Sanskrit in Indian life Outsiders’ views The spread of Sanskrit Sanskrit in India Sanskrit in South-East Asia Sanskrit carried by Buddhism: Central and eastern Asia Sanskrit supplanted The charm of Sanskrit The roots of Sanskrit’s charm Limiting weaknesses Sanskrit no longer alone 6 Three Thousand Years of Solipsism: The Adventures of Greek Greek at its acme Who is a Greek? What kind of a language? Homes from home: Greek spread through settlement Kings of Asia: Greek spread through war A Roman welcome: Greek spread through culture Mid-life crisis: Attempt at a new beginning Intimations of decline Bactria, Persia, Mesopotamia Syria, Palestine, Egypt Greece Anatolia Consolations in age Retrospect: The life cycle of a classic 7 Contesting Europe: Celt, Roman, German and Slav Reversals of fortune The contenders: Greek and Roman views The Celts The Germans The Romans The Slavs Rún: The impulsive pre-eminence of the Celts Traces of Celtic languages How to recognise Celtic Celtic literacy How Gaulish spread The Gauls’ advances in the historic record Consilium: The rationale of Roman Imperium Mōs Māiōrum—the Roman way The desertion of Gaulish Latin among the Basques and the Britons Einfall: Germanic and Slavic advances The Germanic invasions—irresistible and ineffectual Slavonic dawn in the Balkans Against the odds: The advent of English 8 The First Death of Latin PART III: LANGUAGES BY SEA 9 The Second Death of Latin 10 Usurpers of Greatness: Spanish in the New World Portrait of a conquistador An unprecedented empire First chinks in the language barrier: Interpreters, bilinguals, grammarians Past struggles: How American languages had spread The spread of Nahuatl The spread of Quechua The spreads of Chibcha, Guaraní, Mapudungun The Church’s solution: The lenguas generales The state’s solution: Hispanización Coda: Across the Pacific 11 In the Train of Empire: Europe"’s Languages Abroad Portuguese pioneers An Asian empire Portuguese in America Dutch interlopers La francophonie French in Europe The first empire The second empire The Third Rome, and all the Russias The origins of Russian Russian east then west Russian north then south The status of Russian The Soviet experiment Conclusions Curiously ineffective—German ambitions Imperial epilogue: Kōminka 12 Microcosm or Distorting Mirror? The Career of English Endurance test: Seeing off Norman French English overlaid Spreading the Anglo-Norman package The waning of Norman French Stabilising the language What sort of a language? Westward Ho! Pirates and planters Someone else’s land Manifest destiny Winning ways Changing perspective—English in India A merchant venture Protestantism, profit and progress Success, despite the best intentions The world taken by storm An empire completed Wonder upon wonder English among its peers PART IV: LANGUAGES TODAY AND TOMORROW 13 The Current Top Twenty 14 Looking Ahead What is old What is new Way to go Three threads: Freedom, prestige and learnability Freedom Prestige What makes a language learnable Vaster than empires NOTES BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS About the Author PRAISE FOR Empires of the Word Copyright About the Publisher PREFACE qūwatu l- ’insāni fi ‘aqlihi wa lisānihi. The strength of a person is in his intelligence and his tongue. (Arabic proverb) If language is what makes us human, it is languages that make us superhuman. Human thought is unthinkable without the faculty of language, but language pure and undifferentiated is a fantasy of philosophers. Real language is always found in some local variant: English, Navajo, Chinese, Swahili, Burushaski or one of several thousand others. And every one of these links its speakers into a tradition that has survived for thousands of years. Once learnt in a human community, it will provide access to a vast array of knowledge and belief: assets that empower us, when we think, when we listen, when we speak, read or write, to stand on the shoulders of so much ancestral thought and feeling. Our language places us in a cultural continuum, linking us to the past, and showing our meanings also to future fellow-speakers. This book is fundamental. It is about the history of those traditions, the languages. Far more than princes, states or economies, it is language- communities who are the real players in world history, persisting through the ages, clearly and consciously perceived by their speakers as symbols of identity, but nonetheless gradually changing, and perhaps splitting or even merging as the communities react to new realities. This interplay of languages is an aspect of history that has too long been neglected. As well as being the banners and ensigns of human groups, languages guard our memories too. Even when they are unwritten, languages are the most powerful tools we have to conserve our past knowledge, transmitting it, ever and anon, to the next generation. Any human language binds together a human community, by giving it a network of communication; but it also dramatizes it, providing the means to tell, and to remember, its stories. It is not possible, even in a book as big as this one, to tell all those stories. Empires of the Word concentrates on the languages that, for one reason or another, grew out from their homes, and spread across the world. But even with such a stringent entry qualification, cutting the number of stories from many thousand to a couple of dozen, the remaining diversity is still overwhelming. In a way, there are so many tales to tell that the work is less a telling of a single story than a linguistic Thousand and One Nights. We shall range over the amazing innovations, in education, culture and diplomacy, thought up by speakers of Sumerian and its successors in the Middle East, right up to the Arabic of the present day; the uncanny resilience of Chinese through twenty centuries of invasions; the charmed progress of Sanskrit from north India to Java and Japan; the engaging self-regard of Greek; the struggles that gave birth to the languages of modern Europe; and much later, the improbable details of how they were projected across the world. Besides these epic achievements, language failures are no less interesting. The Western Roman Empire was thoroughly overrun by German-speakers in the fifth century. These conquests laid the basis for the countries of modem western Europe: so why did German get left behind? In Africa, Egyptian had been surviving foreign takeovers for over three millennia: why did it shrivel and disappear after the influx of Muhammad’s Arabic? And in the modern era, the Netherlands had ruled the East Indies for the same period that Britain ruled India: so why is Dutch unknown in modern Indonesia? Until such questions are answered, the global spread of English can never be understood. On a cultural level, there is fascination too in the world-views that went with the advancing and receding languages. Ironies abound: Latin could make no headway with the sophisticates of the eastern Mediterranean, who spoke Greek and Aramaic, but it was quickly embraced by the illiterate peoples of Gaul and Spain. In the Americas, Catholic missionaries slowed for centuries the spread of Spanish, but in Asia, Evangelical Protestants turned out to be crucial to the take- up of English. We may as well admit at the outset that the mysteries of linguistic attraction and linguistic influence run deep: to tell the story is not always to understand it. Nevertheless, I believe that the universal study of language history, of which this is a first attempt, is at least as enlightening and valid a focus for science as the more usual concerns of historical linguistics. It is as significant to compare the linguistic effects of the Roman and the Germanic conquests of Gaul as it is to compare the structures of the Latin and Germanic verb-systems—indeed just possibly one might throw some light on the other. Languages by their nature